Well, no, I am not 64 yet, but an important anniversary is coming up.  Next year it will be 20 years since my freshman year of college.  That is an unbelievable amount of time to have passed.  Somebody once told me that before you know it, 20 years of your life will have passed.  Well, I’m there.

But it is a milestone that I am experiencing in a very interesting way.  As a part of my work obligations, I take students to see colleges and stand where I stood with my parents, listening to people talking about dining hall options, class sizes, athletic facilities and what not.  I have to admit that I enjoy the process much more taking the students around than when I actually was a student.

One sort of highlight of those my own college visits was a trip to Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where we visited a “typical” college dorm room.  It featured a road sign that had been liberated from its rightful place on a highway and a pyramid of beer cans and bottles of Jack Daniels.  My father gave me a very subtle, rather unspoken sign that I would not be attending this particular institution of higher education.

None of the places I visited for college appealed to me at all and I finally came around to even somewhat liking the college I ultimately attended in a very funny way.  About a month before I was to leave for college, the school I went to sent a letter to my parents saying that there were rock concerts on the campus and that they had a lot of study abroad options.  My parents never let me go to concerts in high school and study abroad was something I had also wanted to do for a long time.  One day there will be a blog entry, complete with musical accompaniment and Bergman references to describe that.  So that was how I was convinced to even consider liking the place I went to college.

Well, have at it class of 2015: